The last of these metrical poems I'll read
is a poem called Looks.
I was looking through a book of photographs
by a photographer called Robert Mapplethorpe--
came out last fall, I think, and it's entirely
a book of portraits--
and came across the portrait of somebody I had known.
And not somebody I'd liked very much, but somebody I'd known,
who lived in the same house as a friend of mine and somebody
who lived in the same district as me and I'd seen quite a bit
over a number of years.
Not a particularly pleasant person,
but a person who had the most extraordinary eyes,
you'd notice them at once.
This is not like Isherwood's eyes,
there was a kind of glow about him.
He was highly conscious of this, he was an actor,
I'm sure he used it.
He was-- he was-- he knew that this was a gift,
I called this a gift in the poem.
But there's an extraordinary glow
about these eyes, which you notice in this poem.
This poem came out of remembering this.
And I suppose I'm using the word "looks"
in the title in a punning sense, both
looks that you give somebody else and looks in the sense
that this is your appearance.
I don't like his looks, you might say.
Those eyes appear to transmit energy and hold it back,
undissipated, too.
His gaze is like a star that cannot see,
a glow so steady he directs at you,
you try to be the first to look aside,
less flattered by the appearance of attention than vexed
by the dim stirrings thus implied within a mind kept
largely in suspension.
Although, a gaze sought out and highly placed
by lovers and photographers, it is too patly overwhelming
for your taste.
You step back from such mannered solemnities
to focus on his no doubt sinewy power, his restless movements,
and his bony cheek.
You've seen him, in the space of one half hour,
cross a street 20 times.
You've heard him speak, reading his work
to the surprise of guests who find
that dinner was a stratagem.
Poems, in which the attracted turned to pests
if they touch him before he touches
them, in which the celebrant of an appetite richly fulfilled
will say, "get off me, bitch" to one
who thought she had an equal right to her desires.
Nevertheless, in which he holds you
by the voice of his demands, which
take unfaltering body on the air as need itself, live,
famished, clenched like hands, pale at the knuckle.
Then, his luminous stare, that too.
He is an actor, after all.
And it's a genuine talent he engages
in playing this one character.
Mean, small, but driven like Othello by his rages,
as if a passion for no matter what, even the self,
is fully justified.
Or as if anger could repopulate the bony city
he is trapped inside.
At times, he has a lover he can hurt by bringing home
the pickups he despises because they let him pick them up.
Alert always to looks, and they must look like prizes,
he blurs further distinction, for he knows nothing
of strength but its apparent drift, tending and tending,
and nothing of repose, except within his kindled gaze,
his gift.